Preacher's Journey (9 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: Preacher's Journey
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As for Angela, she was Peter's best chance. He would need her intelligence and level-headedness if he was going to get by.
Preacher's senses were still razor sharp, even while he was musing about the ultimate fate of the Galloway family, so he was aware of it when someone climbed out of the wash and hurried toward him. The urgency of the footsteps told Preacher that something must have gone wrong again.
It was even worse than he expected. Jonathan Galloway came up to him, puffing and blowing, and gasped, “Preacher! Preacher, the children . . . They're gone!”
FOURTEEN
Preacher swung around, alarm growing rapidly inside him. “Gone?” he repeated. “Hell, they can't be gone! I done told 'em to stay close to the wagons. Maybe they're just hidin' somewhere.”
Jonathan shook his head and said, “No, we looked everywhere, in all the wagons. I tell you, Preacher, they've vanished! I called them for supper, and they . . . They just aren't there!”
“Did you check for tracks?”
“Tracks?”
“In the snow,” Preacher said, trying to hang on to his patience. He had to remember he was dealing with folks who knew blessed little about the frontier and its ways of life.
“Good Lord, I don't think we did! I . . . I never even thought of it.”
“Come on,” Preacher said grimly. “Let's go have a look.”
When Preacher got back to camp with Jonathan, he found the place in an uproar. The men were running up and down the wash, calling the children's names. Angela stood at the back of Roger and Dorothy's wagon, looking worried, as well she might since two of her kids were out there somewhere in the night, unaccounted for.
“Preacher!” she exclaimed when she saw him coming. She ran to him and clutched his arm. “Preacher, the children are gone!”
“I know,” he told her, then tried to make his voice reassuring as he went on. “No need to worry, I reckon we'll find 'em mighty quicklike. They can't have gotten too far in the time they've been gone.”
“That's just it,” Angela said. “No one remembers the last time they were here. They could have been gone for hours!”
Preacher's jaw tightened as he realized he was guilty too of not keeping a close enough eye on the young'uns. Of course, he'd had a lot on his mind, but that was no excuse.
“We'll find 'em,” he promised again, then turned and called to the others, “Everybody stop runnin' around! You're liable to stomp out the tracks they left.”
He told Angela to return to her job of tending to Dorothy, then motioned for the others to gather around him. When the men were all there, Preacher picked up a burning brand from the fire and used it as a torch. “Let's have a look around,” he said.
It took him only a few minutes to find the small, kid-sized footprints on the other side of the wagons. The tracks led off up the wash and evidently disappeared around a bend. From the looks of them, Preacher figured Mary and Brad had taken off first, and then later Nate had followed his younger cousins. He recalled telling Nate to check on them.
Nate had found them missing and had gone to look for them, Preacher thought. He was as sure of it as if he had seen the whole thing.
“All right, it won't be no trouble to follow these tracks,” he said. “I don't expect to run into any trouble, but I'll take a couple of you with me just in case.”
“Geoffrey and I will go,” Jonathan volunteered immediately.
“Yes, that's a good idea,” Geoffrey added without hesitation. “The rest can stay here and guard the camp.”
Preacher nodded. “That's what I had in mind. You fellas get rifles and pistols. Sooner we get after them young'uns, the sooner we can bring 'em back.”
Roger and Peter were both worried. Peter began, “Preacher, I know we've had our differences—”
Preacher stopped him. “That don't mean nothin' at a time like this. We'll get 'em back. You boys who're stayin' here best be on your guard all the time. Don't let up.”
“We won't,” Roger said. He looked as if he had been driven almost to distraction, what with the troubles his wife was having giving birth and now the disappearance of his son, but he was holding it together somehow. He gave Preacher a solemn nod.
Jonathan and Geoffrey were well armed when they came back from their wagons. Each man carried a rifle and a pair of pistols. Preacher nodded to them and said, “Let's go.” They started up the wash, following the footprints that they could see by starlight. Dog tried to run ahead of them, but Preacher called him back. He didn't want Dog messing up the tracks that the young'uns had left.
The children had gone farther than Preacher expected. He and his two companions followed the trail for a good mile up the wash, and then the prints climbed another caved-in section of bank and started off to the west, toward the higher foothills. Preacher wondered where in blazes those sprouts thought they were going.
A three-quarter moon was rising, and the silvery light it cast threw the landscape into sharp contrasts. The shadows of the trees stood out starkly against the thin snow cover on the ground. The moonlight also made the footprints easier to see. Preacher moved quickly, trusting to Geoffrey and Jonathan to keep up. The older men were soon huffing and puffing, but they persisted gamely in their efforts. Preacher slowed the pace a little only when he became worried that they were breathing so hard their approach might be heard too easily if any danger was lurking in the dark. Geoffrey and Jonathan were grateful for even that much of a respite.
The trail entered a dense stretch of woods and became harder to follow due to the thick shadows under the trees. Preacher slowed even more. He had to be careful now. If he lost the trail, in all likelihood he wouldn't be able to find it again until morning.
And even though it wasn't as cold tonight as it had been, the air still had quite a chill in it. Would it be enough to freeze some little kids to death if they had to stay out here all night?
Preacher had to admit that he didn't know, and that uncertainty ate at his insides and made him want to go faster. He had to hold himself back, take it slow, and be certain what he was doing and where he was going.
He just wished he could stop thinking about how, no matter where they were, those kids had to be mighty scared right about now.
 
 
Nate prodded Mary and Brad along, saying, “We've got to keep going. If we stop, we might freeze to death.”
“But I'm cold,” Mary whined, as if she hadn't heard him just say that he was trying to keep them from freezing to death.
“I wanna go back to the wagon,” Brad added.
“That's what we're trying to do,” Nate said. “We'll be back soon.”
He wished he could be as sure of that as he hoped he sounded. To tell the truth, he wasn't sure they were even going toward the wagons. Out here in the woods, it was easy to get turned around. Once he'd caught up to the two younger children, Nate had tried to turn right around and follow his own tracks, because he knew that would take him back to the wash where the wagons were. Unfortunately, he had somehow strayed from them, and even though he
thought
he was going in the right direction, he couldn't be certain of that.
Each step could be taking them farther away from safety and deeper into the wilderness. He didn't like to even think about that possibility.
If they got back safely
—when
they got back safely, he amended the thought sternly—he was going to ask Preacher to teach him how to tell where he was going by looking at the stars. Nate knew Preacher could do that, and he figured the mountain man could teach him too. If he knew now, he could find his way back.
It occurred to him to look for the moon. The moon rose in the east, didn't it, and he and Mary and Brad were west of the campsite. Therefore, if they walked toward the moon, they would get where they were going.
The moon was already pretty high, though, and as he gazed at it, Nate wondered where exactly it had risen. He took a guess, and since it matched the direction they were already going, he figured that was good enough and kept plodding along.
“I'm tired,” Mary said suddenly. “I'm not going any farther. I'm going to sit down on that log.”
She marched over to the log, a good-sized fallen pine that had probably been struck by lightning sometime in the past, and sat down just as she had threatened. Nate stood in front of her and said, “We got to go on. We can't stop. They're bound to be lookin' for us by now, and the longer we're gone, the more trouble we'll be in.”
“I didn't want to go,” Brad said as he came up beside Nate. “She made me.”
“Did not!” his sister said sharply.
“Did too!” Brad shot back. “I told you we'd get in trouble if we left the camp!”
“You wanted to go exploring even more than I did,” Mary said accusingly.
“Did not!”
“Both of you hush up,” Nate told them. “It doesn't matter whose idea it was. We just gotta get back, that's all.”
“We'll walk some more in a little bit,” Mary said. “I just want to rest a while first.”
“Well . . .” Maybe it would be all right, Nate thought. They were all tired. If he could rig some sort of shelter, maybe it wouldn't hurt anything to let his cousins rest. They were younger and smaller than him, after all. He couldn't expect them to be as strong as he was.
“Let's get some of these branches and put them against the log,” he said. “We can make a little lean-to.”
“You do it,” Brad said. “I'm tired.”
“We'll
all
do it,” Nate insisted. “Come on. Then we can rest for a while.”
Grudgingly, the two younger children pitched in to help. Within a few minutes, they had several pine boughs leaning against the fallen tree, forming a little cavelike hollow. All three of the youngsters crawled in. Nate felt better immediately since they now had at least a crude shelter. He broke several smaller sticks off the branches and made a pile of them, then reached into his coat.
“I got some flint and steel and tinder,” he said. “I'll see if I can make a fire.”
“You're not supposed to play with fire,” Mary said. “You're not even 'sposed to have that stuff.”
“Hush up,” Nate ordered again. “I know what I'm doin'.”
This was what Preacher would do if he was here, Nate thought as he began trying to strike sparks with the flint and steel. Preacher would build a fire, because they needed a fire to warm them on a cold night like this. He fumbled with it, since he didn't have much experience at such things, and it seemed like every time he struck a spark, it failed to fall into the little pile of tinder that he had poured out in the middle of the pile of sticks.
But finally one of the sparks fell properly and the tinder caught. Nate leaned closer and blew on the tiny flame. It grew larger and curled around one of the sticks until the stick began to smolder and then burn. The fire spread, and its reddish-yellow glow grew brighter inside the little makeshift shelter. That made Nate feel better too.
“We'll just sit here and warm up for a while, and then we'll finish walking back to camp,” he told the others. They all held out their hands toward the fire to warm them.
After a few minutes, Mary leaned her head against Nate's shoulder. Brad crawled closer on the other side and rested his head in Nate's lap. Nate braced himself against the trunk of the fallen tree. His eyelids grew heavy. He knew he was getting drowsy and tried to fight it off, thinking that it would be much better if he could stay awake, but the urge was just too strong. His eyes drooped closed. The last thing he was aware of was sliding his arms around his cousins as they huddled next to him, and then all three young'uns were sound asleep.
FIFTEEN
Preacher eventually located the spot where Nate had caught up to Mary and Brad, and from that point on, the three youngsters had traveled together. Unfortunately, one of the things Preacher had worried about appeared to have come true: The tracks led in huge circles. The kids were wandering around and around in the foothills, utterly lost.
“What are we going to do, Preacher?” Jonathan asked. “If we follow the tracks, won't we get lost too?”
Preacher shook his head. He knew he could rely on his inner sense of direction to point out the right way back to the camp any time he wanted to return there. He didn't intend to go back, though, without the children. If they were abandoned out here, their lives could be measured in days, if not hours.
He reminded himself that he had been only a few years older than Nate when he first came to the Rocky Mountains, but that was different. Life had hardened him to the point that he could take care of himself, at least to a certain extent. Nate had no experience at surviving in the wilderness, and he had the two younger kids to look after, on top of everything else.
“We've got to try to figure out where they're going to wind up and then head straight for that spot,” Preacher said.
“How are we going to do that?” Geoffrey asked. “It looks to me like they're just wandering aimlessly. They could be anywhere.”
“Maybe not.” Preacher let his eyes rove over the moonlit landscape. “Folks just naturally tend to go certain ways and avoid certain things. If you know the country, you can sort of figure where somebody would be likely to go. And I know the country.”
“But you're still talking about an educated guess,” Jonathan pointed out.
Preacher nodded. “Yep, but I've got the education. These mountains have been my school for years now. I know the obstacles those young'uns are likely to come across, and I know how they probably got around 'em.”
“But what if your guess is wrong?” Geoffrey asked.
“It won't be,” Preacher said flatly.
Because if it was . . . well, he wasn't going to think too much about that. Not yet anyway.
The three men trudged on into the night.
 
 
Angela Galloway had been through three labors: Mary, Brad, and a couple of years earlier another girl who had been stillborn. That last delivery had been difficult, difficult enough so that Angela had known something was wrong as soon as it started, and the two previous ones were painful as well. But despite that, Angela knew she had never gone through anything like what her sister-in-law Dorothy was enduring now.
Angela sat beside the thick bedroll where Dorothy lay and brushed back several strands of brown hair from the sweat-beaded forehead. The fact that Dorothy could sweat when the weather was as cold as it was spoke volumes for the pain she was in. Dorothy wasn't aware of the cold. She probably wasn't aware of anything except the overwhelming need to get that baby out of her body.
But the baby, bless its heart, sure didn't want to come.
Of course, helping Dorothy through this ordeal wasn't the only thing on Angela's mind. Her two children were out there somewhere in the cold and dark, and there wasn't a thing she could do to help them or comfort them. The feeling of helplessness that gripped her made her sick at her stomach if she thought about it too much. Fear gnawed at her nerves. She loved Mary and Brad, loved them dearly, and the thought that she might never see them again was almost too much for her to grasp. She knew she had to keep herself busy and distracted, or else she might give in to the panic that tried to well up inside her.
“Peter,” Dorothy murmured.
That was odd, Angela thought. Dorothy had just called her brother-in-law's name, not her husband's. And that wasn't the first strange thing Dorothy had said during the past few days, when she seemed to be out of her head more often than not. Of course, Dorothy had mentioned all of the Galloways at one time or another during her ramblings, so her saying Peter's name now didn't have to mean anything....
Another wave of contractions gripped Dorothy. She threw her head back and screamed. Cords of muscle stood out on the sides of her neck. Angela held her hand and spoke to her, trying to calm her and get her to push. Dorothy was trying, but the baby just wouldn't come. If a doctor or an experienced midwife had been here, they might have been able to tell if the baby was turned wrong in the womb or if there was some other problem. But Angela just didn't know, and didn't know what else to do either.
The contractions passed. Dorothy subsided, her arched back easing down onto the bedroll. When she was breathing easier again, Angela thought it was safe to stand up and get a breath of fresh air. She went to the rear of the wagon and moved the canvas flap aside. She was shocked to see the gray light of dawn filling the camp.
It was nearly morning. The children had been missing all night.
Before Angela could think about that, another scream ripped from Dorothy's throat, and this one had a different sound to it than any of them before. Angela jerked around sharply and hurried to her sister-in-law's side. She lifted the blankets draped over Dorothy's upraised knees and then gasped as she saw the blood.
The baby had to come now, or both mother and child were going to die. Angela was sure of it.
 
 
Hawley woke up with his teeth chattering and his bones aching from the cold that had seeped into them during the night. The Injuns hadn't given him any robes or blankets to help ward off the chill. All he'd had to warm him were his buckskins and his capote.
But he was still alive, by Godfrey! He hadn't frozen to death, and the lightening of the sky overhead told him that dawn wasn't far away. The sun didn't provide much heat at this time of year, but any warmth was better than none.
And every minute that he remained alive was a blessing, even though he was still in the hands of the savages.
Hawley wondered if they had decided yet whether or not to kill him. He had fallen asleep the night before while they were still talking. The warriors had been ringed in a circle around a small fire, and they had taken turns speaking with the long-winded eloquence common to Injuns. Hawley understood only a few words of the Arikara tongue—mostly words that had to do with drinking and screwing—so he hadn't really been able to follow the discussion that well. The big ugly buck who seemed to be the war chief was called Swift Arrow, and he wanted to keep Hawley alive and use him to help find that bunch of immigrants. Another Injun, one called Badger Something-or-other, thought it would be best to go ahead and kill him, the sooner and the more painfully the better. The others seemed about equally divided on the question, and if anybody had told Hawley that he could doze off while his very fate was being debated, he would have told them they were crazy. That was exactly what had happened, though. Exhaustion had caught up to him.
Did the fact he was still alive mean that Swift Arrow had prevailed in the argument? Hawley didn't know. He turned his head and looked around, hoping to find out.
He was still lying against a tree with his hands and feet bound. He could barely feel his extremities, a condition due to the cold as well as to the tightness of his bonds. Not far away, the Injuns were up and about, gathered around the campfire. He might have been wrong, but Hawley thought there were fewer of them in the bunch now.
Swift Arrow was still there, though. Noticing that Hawley was awake, he stood up and walked over to the trapper, stalking over the snow-covered ground like a mountain lion.
“You live,” he greeted Hawley.
“Yeah,” the trapper croaked, his voice rusty and uncomfortable in his throat. “Am I gonna keep on livin'?”
“You help us find Preacher.”
It wasn't a question, but Hawley nodded eagerly anyway. “That's right,” he said. “I'll help you find Preacher. I'll even help you kill him.”
“Swift Arrow kill Preacher.”
There was no room for argument in that flat statement, and Hawley no longer cared who killed Preacher as long as the son of a bitch wound up dead. He said, “Sure. Swift Arrow kill Preacher.”
The chief nodded emphatically. He returned to the fire, then came back to Hawley a moment later. He put a piece of jerky in Hawley's mouth. Hawley chewed eagerly on the tough strip of meat as he realized how ravenously hungry he was.
“I'll show you today where those wagons went,” he said around the jerky. “It won't take us long to find them pilgrims. A day or two, that's all.”
“Swift Arrow send out scouts.”
Hawley figured out after a second what the chief meant. Swift Arrow had already sent out some of the warriors to have a look around. That's why there were fewer of the Injuns gathered around the fire.
“That's fine, but you don't have to worry,” he said. “I can find them you're lookin' for.”
Swift Arrow smiled thinly. “Not worry. White man worry.”
“That's right,” Hawley said, bobbing his head in agreement and smiling back at the savage. He was damned worried.
And he would be until the man called Preacher was dead and these bloody-handed redskins were in his, Mart Hawley's, debt.
 
 
Nate dreamed about his home back in Philadelphia and the kids who had gone to school with him. They had been envious and impressed when he told them his family was forming a wagon train and going west to live in the Oregon Territory. It sounded like such a grand adventure. . . and it had been, up to a point.
Then everything had started going wrong.
But in his dream, Nate was back in the classroom at the academy he attended. His pa and his Uncle Roger and his grandpa Simon all had money, and they could afford to send Nate to a fancy school. Folks tended to think of immigrants as poor people, but the Galloways had money, no doubt about that. Nate dreamed he was there again, only instead of the clothes he had usually worn to school, he was garbed in fringed buckskins and wore a big hat. He had a powder horn slung over his shoulder and carried one of those long-barreled rifles like Preacher carried. In real life, a Hawken was so heavy he could barely pick one up, let alone cradle it in the crook of his arm like it was a part of him, but he didn't have any trouble with it in his dream. All the kids stared wide-eyed at him, especially when he slid the long-bladed hunting knife from the beaded sheath on his belt and showed it to them. And when they asked him where he had been, he just grinned and said,
Why, I been to the mountains, boys. I'm a mountain man now.
It was the best dream Nate had had in a long time.
But like all dreams, it came to an end.
He wasn't sure what woke him; all he knew was that he was cold and stiff and hungry, and he needed to pee really bad. Mary and Brad still leaned on him in their crude shelter underneath the pine boughs they had propped against the fallen tree. They were still asleep.
Light peeked through a couple of gaps in the branches above Nate's head. Was it morning already? Had they made it through the night? Evidently so, and Nate felt his spirits lift at that realization. Now that it was light again, they could see where they were going. He was confident that they could find their way back to camp in no time.
Of course, when they got there they were going to be in a whole heap of trouble, as Preacher would say. They'd been gone all night, and their parents were bound to be worried sick. When grown-ups got scared, they also got mad. They'd hug a fella's neck when they saw he was all right, then paddle his butt. Then hug some more and likely paddle some more. But whatever happened, Nate and his cousins would just have to take their medicine. They had it comin'.
And it would be worth it to be warm again, and to get something to eat.
First, though, he had to get out of here and relieve the insistent pressure on his bladder. He took hold of Mary's shoulders and eased her down until she was lying on the ground. She didn't wake up. Then he carefully slipped his leg out from under Brad's head.
His muscles were so stiff he could barely move as he tried to crawl out of the pine-bough lean-to. He wanted to grunt and groan with the effort, but he held the sounds back so he wouldn't disturb his cousins. Nate had heard his grandpa and his uncles make noises like he wanted to make now when they had to get up out of their chairs, and he wondered if they felt like this all the time. It must be horrible to be old, he thought.
He blinked as he emerged into the light. Even though the sun was barely up and the light was still watery and dim, it seemed bright to him. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled over to a nearby tree. With fingers stiff from the cold, he fumbled at the buttons of his trousers and finally got them open. He closed his eyes in relief as he started to pee into the snowdrift on the other side of the tree.
That was when he heard a branch snap and opened his eyes to see an Indian standing no more than a dozen feet away, a tomahawk in his hand and a savage grin on his red, paint-daubed face.

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